Last week we promised to focus on those features of ESI PRO particularly aimed at increasing the speed of the editing process during interactive translation.

We intend also to refute the notion that machine translation is a slower process, because allegedly, “it takes more time to edit the output of the program than to do the whole translation manually from beginning to end”.

No doubt, this is true of the first programs that appeared last century and which still enjoy a widespread presence in the market. And, no doubt, they are responsible for the poor opinion of machine translation among the general public.

In the case of ESI you will immediately notice that – even in the case of automatic translation — the output is generally fit for publication with just a few minor editing touches in about 60% of the sentences. And for the remaining 40% , ESI PRO offers you the Interactive Mode, a revolutionary feature that was introduced by Word Magic Software in 1998. This feature is unique to ESI: you will find it nowhere else.

Here is why we say that translation with ESI PRO, Interactive Mode has to be a much faster, expedient and effortless process than manual translation:

The mere fact of having all the Spanish words automatically appear in the bottom box without having to type them out and then spell-check them is an important time-saving factor.

Just clicking on a word will immediately display all its possible parts of speech, meanings, translations and alternate translations for your selection. Compare this to having to search through several huge paper dictionaries each time you want to use an alternate translation.

In case ESI gets the wrong interpretation of a particularly difficult sentence, you can generally fix it by just clicking on the correct part of speech of the word that is causing the trouble. (See examples next week)

If you need a particular word to be translated in a particular way for your industry-specific application, you can always set your preferred translation using ESI’s Memory Translation system.

You can easily add a new word, in case the desired translation is not included in our dictionaries, and thus build up your own industry-specific dictionary.

Click on the “Literal” tag (on the horizontal tags) if you want that word to be left untranslated.

“OK”- You might say- “We already knew all of this. What’s really new for this week?”

Since we are running short of space and exceeding the one-page maximum length which we promised for each delivery, we will send you this week’s tip next week, if you bear with us on this occasion. Then we will unveil the “secret feature”.